The great hall of the Royal College of Saint Michael was perpetually cold, but on that late autumn afternoon, the chill seemed to seep from the very pores of the ancient stone, piercing to the bone. Kaden Rose stood before the cold iron brazier, feeling the weight of fifty gazes like needles against his back. Bored ones, pitying ones, and from the sons of earls and merchants in the front rows, thinly-veiled derision.
"Whenever you are ready, Rose." Master Thorold's voice echoed off the stone walls, not unkindly, but with that weary patience reserved for the least promising students.
Kaden's palms were clammy. The incantation, "Incendire rudimentum," was the most basic flame-kindling spell, taught to every first-year. It was supposed to coax a docile, candle-like glow from the coals. His classmates had produced sputtering sparks, or restless little flames. Isabella de Montfort in the front row, however, had conjured a perfectly steady flicker at her fingertip, its heart burning an eerie blue.
He drew a shallow breath, the air thick with the scent of old parchment, damp wool, and the ozone left behind by spent magic. He could feel the unvoiced sneers. The miller's boy from the north. Still got mud on his boots. These whispers had clung to him since he'd entered Westminster, a scholarship student adrift in a sea of silk and inherited power.
Focusing on the blackened coals, he poured his will into the Latin words. "Incendire rudimentum!"
A wisp of grey smoke twisted feebly and vanished. The brazier remained silent, the iron cold.
A distinct snort came from his left. "More like Extinguere rudimentum," someone muttered. Snickers rippled through the hall, quickly stifled but all the more cutting for it.
Heat flooded Kaden's cheeks—a fire he had no trouble summoning without a spell. He stared fixedly at the scuffed toes of his boots, so coarse against the polished flagstones. His mother's face swam before him, lined by wind and weather yet always gentle. Her faith in him, all her sacrifices to get him here, now felt like a physical weight of failure pressing on his shoulders.
"Courageous attempt, Kaden." Master Thorold sighed, making a mark on his parchment. "Fundamentals require more work. Next, Alistair Vane."
As Kaden shuffled back to the shadowed rows, the dismissal bell tolled, its deep bronze reverberation shaking the very air. He gathered his wax tablet and stylus, shame a cold, hard knot in his gut. He was shoving them into his worn satchel when a flash of silver caught his eye at the high, leaded-glass window.
An owl—no, an owl's ghost, nearly transparent and shimmering—passed straight through the solid glass. The magic was exquisite, far beyond their curriculum. It glided soundlessly over the heads of chattering students, unseen, and dissolved into a scroll that settled softly onto Kaden's tablet.
The blood in his veins seemed to freeze. Sealed with deep crimson wax was a sigil he knew too well: a phoenix with outspread wings, wreathed in thorny shadow. His mother's emergency seal. She'd shown it to him only once, her expression uncharacteristically grave. Only when the shadows begin to move, Kaden. Only then.
His fingers trembled as he broke the seal. The elegant, familiar script was frantic, ink blotted.
Kaden,
Come home. Now. The men with the wolf-head rings are at the village inn. They are asking about me, about our family. Trust no one at the College. Speak of this to no one. Burn this the moment you read it.
Love,
Mother
The words wavered before his eyes. Wolf-head rings. His mother's past, those vague fragments of her life before his father, before the quiet mill in Oxfordshire, surged up like a dark tide. She was always secretive, her magic subtle and strange, nothing like the rigid spells in his textbooks.
He did not hesitate. Clutching the letter, he slung his satchel over his shoulder and broke into a run, ignoring the curious glances. He burst through the heavy oak doors of the Hall of Elements into the central quadrangle. Dusk spread across the sky like a bruise, the air biting. He needed the stables. He needed a horse.
"Rose! A moment."
The voice came from behind him—calm, mellifluous, bearing the distinct cadence of an Imperial accent. It brought him up short.
Professor Silas von Heller emerged from the shadow of an arched doorway, his dark robes seeming to drink the last of the fading light. He was tall, his patrician features softened by a habitual, pensive expression. Those remarkable grey eyes—flecked with gold—fixed on Kaden.
"Pr-Professor von Heller," Kaden gasped, trying to mask the panic in his voice, crumpling the letter in his fist.
"Leaving in quite a hurry. Is everything alright?" The Professor's gaze was sharp, but not interrogative. He was the youngest tenured professor of Thaumaturgical Theory, rumored to have refused positions at the Imperial court to teach here. To Kaden, he had always been different—never mocking his rough northern accent or humble origins. In their few tutorial sessions, his patience had been almost… paternal.
"I… word from home, sir. My mother… she's taken ill. Suddenly." The lie burned his throat.
A shadow of genuine concern crossed Silas's face. "Ah. That is… troubling. Family comes first." He paused, reaching into his robe and producing a small, heavy purse. "The post coaches are slow, and night is falling. Take this. Hire a fast horse from the livery in town. Your mother needs you now."
Kaden stared at the purse, then up at the Professor. The kindness, so stark against the backdrop of his terror, was almost too much to bear. "I… I can't accept, sir."
"You can, and you shall." Silas pressed the coins firmly into his hand. "Consider it an investment in your potential. I see a spark in you, Kaden, beneath the current… difficulties. A rare one. Do not let the storms of circumstance extinguish it. Go to your mother."
Tears—a volatile mix of fear, gratitude, and shame—pricked at Kaden's eyes. He could only nod, his throat too tight for words.
"Go," Silas said softly, taking a half-step back. "Send word when you can."
Kaden turned and ran, the Professor's words a small, futile ember of warmth against the pervasive cold. He did not look back, and so he did not see how Silas von Heller's expression shifted as he watched him disappear around the corner of the quadrangle—the gentle concern settling, hardening into something far more complex and inscrutable. The Professor stood still for a long moment, his thumb absently, repeatedly, tracing the engraved surface of the silver ring on his finger, its pattern lost in the gathering gloom.
The journey north was a chaotic nightmare of fear and pounding hooves. Kaden drove the rented mare mercilessly, the pallid moon their sole witness. The familiar landscape of home twisted in the darkness, becoming strange and menacing. Every shadow in a ditch, every crack of a twig, transformed into the shape of a man with a wolf's head upon his finger.
Near midnight, he bypassed the sleeping cottages and reached his own home, lonely beside the old mill. No light glowed in the window. No smoke rose from the chimney. The door stood slightly ajar, swinging with a monotonous, dreadful creak in the night wind.
The smell assaulted him first. Not the comforting aromas of baking bread and dried herbs, but the thick, cloying scent of iron, mingled with the dead-ash smell of a fire long cold.
"Mother?" His voice was gravel.
He stepped across the threshold. Moonlight poured through the open doorway, illuminating a scene of wreckage. The simple wooden table was overturned. Their few books were strewn about, pages torn. And by the cold stone hearth, a figure lay curled on the rush-strewn floor.
"No…" He stumbled forward, falling to his knees beside her.
Ariana Rose, his strong, enigmatic mother, was pale as old parchment. Her plain blue dress was soaked through across the abdomen with a stain so dark it was nearly black. Her eyes were closed, her breathing a faint, dreadful rasp, like a torn bellows.
But as his trembling fingers brushed her icy cheek, those eyes flew open. The pupils were dilated with pain, yet in their depths burned a last, terrifyingly lucid light. They locked onto his, and her cold hand shot up, gripping his wrist with shocking strength.
"Kaden…" Her breath was a whisper, blood-flecked spittle on her lips. "You… came…"
"I'll fetch help, I'll get—"
"No time." Her voice was a thread, yet it brooked no argument. "Listen. They came for the Legacy. My blood… our blood… holds the key."
She was raving. "Mother, don't, please, let me—"
"Soul Transmutation," she hissed the term, her nails digging into his flesh. "A covenant of spirit, an exchange of flesh. They want it. I hid it… hid it within you."
Before he could process the madness of her words, the floorboard behind him let out a sharp, tortured groan.
A figure, having slipped in silently from the rear, now filled the inner doorway, his form largely swallowed by shadow. He wore a traveler's cloak, his face obscured, but on his right hand, a ring caught the meager moonlight—a wolf, coiled upon itself, jaws fastened on its own tail.
"Hah," the man said, his voice unnervingly placid, devoid of any regional accent. "The son returns. How… convenient."
He took a step forward. A narrow, wicked dagger gleamed dully in his hand. The blade was clean. He hadn't used it yet. He had been waiting.
A final, defiant light blazed in Ariana's eyes. With the last of her draining strength, her gaze did not seek the assassin, but remained fixed, desperately, on Kaden's face. Her other hand, slick with her own still-warm blood, slapped hard against his forehead.
"See the anchor of the soul!" she cried out, her voice suddenly strong, resonant with an ancient power that vibrated in Kaden's very bones. "Know its true name! Seize its vessel!"
A scream tore through the cottage—a sound that seemed to rip from three throats, from the depths of three souls at once. Kaden's, his mother's, the assassin's. Fire and ice detonated inside his skull! The world spun. A torrent of memories, not his own, battered him: sun-scorched foreign hills, the familiar grip of a different weapon in a different hand, the alien thrill of the hunt and the cold clutch of midnight dread, a name—"Marco"—murmured in prayerful, blood-stained repentance.
The assassin staggered back a step, hands clutching his head, a guttural roar of shock and agony ripping from him. "What… what sorcery is this?!"
The violent connection, whatever it was, snapped.
Ariana's hand slid from Kaden's forehead, limp. The fierce light in her eyes guttered and died. Her last breath misted in the frigid air, her final whisper for his ears alone:
"Become them, Kaden. Become… everyone."
Then, she was still.
The assassin shook his head, as if to clear a piercing whine. When he looked at Kaden again, his eyes held pure wariness and fury. He glanced at Ariana's lifeless form, then at the clean blade in his hand. The task was done, but something he could not comprehend, let alone control, had happened. With one last, searing glare at the stupefied boy, he turned and vanished into the thick darkness beyond the door, his footsteps swiftly swallowed by the night.
Kaden knelt on the cold floor, his mother's body cooling rapidly in his arms. An immense, suffocating silence enveloped him, broken only by the wind's moan through the broken door. Overwhelming grief had not yet risen; a deeper, more numbing void flooded in first.
Then, his gaze, blank and wandering, fell to his mother's right hand, still clenched tight in death. It had loosened in her final spasm, lying palm-up on the filthy, trampled rushes.
Cupped in that palm was not a family locket, nor any token of his father.
It was a lock of coarse, dark hair—clearly not her own—neatly bound with a blood-stained piece of twine.